Colonial Culture in France since the Revolution

Foreword: Moussa the African's Blues

Foreword Moussa the African’s Blues abdourahman a. Waberi Gustave Flaubert once wrote: “Those who read a book in order to know if the baroness marries the count are fools.” i would add: those who read this text in order to find out how France is doing will have the right to feel cheated, for if you want a prognosis, or if you want to develop some kind of perspective on the situation, you’ll have to hurry over to Marcel Pagnol’s beloved Bar de la Marine . onward.1 vacation is a time of idleness, of flânerie and light reading (even mindless newspapers are an ordeal), of collective and simple expression: here, i’m speaking of the emotion felt all the way into the depths of the ardennes by the story of a bear that had escaped from its Pyrenean zoo, or the compassion for a cycling team suspected of doping. in such moments, i feel a bit ashamed of my receding concern for undocumented subjects and other asylum-seeking misfits, those worn down by uncertainty and worry. i think of them at the detention center for foreigners in vincennes, me with not exactly pale skin, who chose to move to this country where i always have to spell out my first and last names. The joy felt by the strange foreigner is not felt once and for all at the moment of landing. in fact, it is often the opposite with the new arrival, the freshly descended, who fears—a feeling that is legitimately aggravated in the case of a refugee or stateless person—that the air and border police (in some cases a Fortde -France [Martinique] or Basse-terre [Guadeloupe] native) will take his return ticket along with his unfortunate passport. The schengen borders become immediately apparent at the Charles-de-Gaulle and orly airports. lately, the French appear half asleep, with one eye and one ear looking and listening to the threats from the party of purifiers who seek to reinstate the nation’s honor (how it was lost, nobody knows) and its lily-white color. Happily, there are still large swaths of the population in which the reflex and the capacity for indignation remain intact. i am thinking of the december 1995 strikers, of young petitioner moviemakers, of the myriad of associations that support the unemployed, the homeless, the socially destitute. light-skinned citizens have shown courage and faith: “if it’s a battle that’s needed, we will not be the last to join forces!” it 343 344 | Waberi would be easy to mock the withdrawal of some and the wild exuberance of others . anyway, onward. France . . . as a child, my first vision of France took the form of an athlete’s body. Male, tan, muscled, shining under the african sun. a body enveloped in sweat. a boxer, an adonis such as Montherlant would have written. i still remember that body— drafted, a mercenary or career military man in the Foreign legion, i did not think of the taxonomy until much later—running every afternoon, while the local bodies stretched out in front of humming fans. Converts to the religion of jogging were alien to this country of nomads used to covering ground. Heavy footed, slow moving, massive bone structure, thirty to forty pounds heavier than the local silhouette—slight, elegant, and at times suffering. in my adolescent eyes, France was powerful. it exuded comfort and health. it worshipped sports and leisure . it was nothing like Theodore Zeldin’s intellectualized France, that daughter of rome, that supposed mother of arts and letters. today, i find my France in the written press, on the one-eyed screen of television—denigrated from on high by the land’s fine minds, who pretend never to watch it except, on occasion, on arte, the brainy channel—in the high school in upper normandy where i teach, in the suburb where i live. But i do not necessarily recognize myself in the French journalist François de Closets claims to be “French down to my fingernails.” a strange image for a man known for his temperance, his centrism in the face of all ordeals, his politically correct look. look out, danger? as a purely postcolonial product, the thousands of faces that France could take me for are inextricably linked to this past, a past that is in actuality very much with us. and it will continue to be among us until we have established on both sides the...